Savannah
One of our favorite features of Once you've uploaded a file (through the "Upload file" menu option or through the rich text editor when creating an entry) you can give your image a title, description and tags. Tags are one to two word short descriptions that best sum up the content. For a photograph of a landscape, your tags might be: photograph, color, landscape, grass, trees. Then, if you're looking for all of the images you've uploaded to your site that contain "trees", it's one click away.
But the best part of asset management with Movable Type 4 is using the auto-generated resizing options to create on-the-fly thumbnails and apply custom cropping to images directly from the templates. On a recent project for Lowcountry Exhibits, Heideldesign leveraged that power to make adding a multitude of different image sizes, crops and effects a one-step process for the client. All they have to do is upload a single photo once.
From there, Movable Type and the custom template set does the rest. On the home page, a custom template creates an XML feed for the scrolling Flash interface with auto-resized and cropped thumbnail images from the first asset on each entry in the "portfolio" category. On the Entry Listing templates, a different thumbnail is created on the fly. For the Entry templates, three different image sizes are created automatically: A medium thumbnail, a small thumbnail and a large javascript-triggered lightbox overlay.
And all the author has to do is upload one image into their Movable Type entry.
Not only is it a huge time saver for the author, it's a great solution for the designer and developer as well. They never have to worry about a design "breaking" due to a mis-sized image. Pixel-level control can be maintained throughout the templates.
If you have a graphic-intensive project and want to learn more about how Movable Type's asset management may be able to help you, contact Heideldesign today for a free consultation.
